Stasys EIDRIGEVIČIUS
1949, Lithuania/Poland

Stasys Eidrigevicius graduated from the Fine Arts Institute in Vilnius. In 1970 he had his first individual exhibition and since 1980 he has been living and working in Poland, enjoying popularity equally among critics and art lovers, both home and abroad. In his work he uses many different artistic techniques, like gouache, oil, pastel, graphics. He has created numerous posters and prints, installations and performances. He has illustrated about sixty books. He also creates bookplates, masks and sculptures. Recently he has eagerly resorted to photography as his means of artistic expression.


\"Lithuania, Soutine\'s country, was the birthplace of Stasys. Works formulated in the most radical manner (almost an equivalent to Thomas Bernhard\'s literary research) to show painting\'s aspirations to become poetry, pure lyric expression. Bosch\'s and Ensor\'s imaginary is recalled by Stasys without any dramatic intention, as a sheer cry, not desperate but stifled. And, in Stasys\'s fantasy, to shut mouths, one needs masks.
Paper faces prevent us from recognizing people but not humanity. Behind those clown- like masks we see wide open eyes, staring at nothing: they don\'t look at us, they look beyond reality. An obsessive repetitiveness, an endless melancholy which is occasionally presented in a festive arcimbolesque manner, having these eyes float in the sky, above the tree tops, like those of Saint Lucia in the iconography of the torments of the martyrs. [...] It is solitude, solitude\".

Source: http://www.finearts.pl/index.php?ac=100&id=4